17 August 2006

Unity in Diversity

The New York Times posted an exciting article this morning: "Overcoming Adoption's Racial Barriers" invites us to consider the many orphaned children in America and the pressing need for American families to truly embrace diversity. Adopting children of a different skin color does not come without difficulties (and the article addresses some of those), but embracing those difficulties and, more importantly, those children seems a special opportunity for the Church to model in its member families what the real Family of God actually looks like.

Judy Stigger, a counselor at The Cradle, a Chicago agency that specializes in interracial adoptions, unintentionally points exactly to the kind of unity-in-diversity that I have in mind: "It's about getting people to realize that they should not be thinking about being, as one 8-year-old put it to me, 'a white family with a weird child,' but a multiracial family." Just like the real family God has been making for centuries.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good point - I think that people today are much more open to multi-racial adoption. It almost makes it easier, in that it encourages the difficult, "who were my mom and dad" conversation sooner... What broght this to mind?